As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress.
As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of competence is so high that six months of concentrated effort is simply not sufficient for an outsider to become a professional architect.
I'm a software engineer that went through architecture school and I think you're glorifying architects a bit here.
The only reason why architects have a more gradual path as you describe is because there is a LOT of gatekeeping and feedback on your work is a LOT slower.
To become an architect you have to ideally go through schooling at a specific set of schools and then after that you have years of internships where you are at the mercy of the architect who supervises you. If you end up with a not-so-friendly boss you could end up working years of your youth in an unpaid internship and end up NOT getting any credit. That's years of delay to licensure. After getting enough credit and hours you still to take multiple exams, paying out of your own pocket, to get licensed. And unlike software, aspiring architects cannot spend a weekend or two to build projects on their own to put on a portfolio of work, and problems from anything you design can take months or years to crop up.
And even after all that only a tiny minority of architects end up in firms like SOM (like Google but for architects) and get to work in glamourous projects. The vast majority of architects just work on run-of-the-mill housing (not unlike CRUD apps) where the combination of building codes, the client's budget, zoning and other requirements often prevents you from doing anything too flashy.
The great thing about software really is the fact you have the independence and ability to build and publicize your own stuff whereas in all the other formal professions you can't without oversight.
> The vast majority of architects just work on run-of-the-mill housing (not unlike CRUD apps) where the combination of building codes, the client's budget, zoning and other requirements often prevents you from doing anything too flashy.
In talking with civil, naval, and mechanical engineers that I know, this type of "crank out another one similar to the last one" work seems to be the norm. I used to be aerospace and thought it was just my company. New part designed, do the same type of analysis and write it up and send it to the FAA, they rubber stamp it. But it's remarkably similar in many fields. The civil guy I know says for every new road/bridge they review it's just the same shit over and over. It's just a white collar assembly line everywhere. It reduces errors and is efficient as a division of labor, but it's not very fun.
Can't say I've ever found a job ad in PT that required that title, though. But hey, maybe it'll get some woman to marry us, as their marketing materials imply: https://preview.ibb.co/gRKupq/eng.png
> The great thing about software really is the fact you have the independence and ability to build and publicize your own stuff whereas in all the other formal professions you can't without oversight.
Agree. I also work in the building industry (Electrical Engineering - power distribution for buildings) and I love software because of the instant feedback loop.
In software, you make a typo and you get an error immediately. You fix it and go on.
In architecture, you make a typo and you hear about it 6 months later, and it's a $200,000 change order (exaggerating...somewhat).
> In software, you make a typo and you get an error immediately. You fix it and go on.
This level of thing is usually silly, ultimately-meaningless errors. (The rare exception being the metric-vs-imperial type things that literally blow up eventually.)
There are many other errors we make every day building software that lead to years or decades of tech debt. The thing we need to figure out is how to get better at making better up-front decisions on that. Being better at monitoring the long-term feedback produced by our designs, so that instead of saying "we should rewrite this in a new framework" we can say "we should restructure this doing X and Y to prevent these types of problems from coming back."
The costs of making better decisions need to be measured against the costs of making poor decisions. Most (but certainly not all) software is ephemeral. If you knew what would be in use in ten years and what would be in the bit bucket, you might make different choices. If you were liable for your choices and mistakes for years and years after your product shipped, you would examine them closer as well.
This is also the case in software "engineering". Don't assume a code monkey who's 22 and can produce a piece of software with heaps worth of technical debt is a master of anything. The best software engineers in the world are generally mid-career (40-50) and have gone through lots of large projects in several different roles.
Just because our industry doesn't want to acknowledge that, doesn't make it less true.
My uncle is an architect (now a master architect) and knowing his career path makes your comment kinda amusing.
Uncle got a Bachelor's in Architecture, and was able to draft plans, but wasn't able to give them actual approval. You need a Master's degree and a certification through the state government, and often the Master's degree is done as part of your employment at a larger firm. And you need another Master-Architect to sponsor your master's, so the larger architecture firms sponsor apprentices-- but they do so with a pretty significant pay-cut to working apprentices.
My uncle is a bit of a scoundrel, looked at that system, and was like "screw that", and solely did drafting. Sure he couldn't finalize plans, but he specialized in doing drafts quickly. (He's admitted that his drafts were probably lower-quality and smudgier than other's, but they were done _far_ faster and cheaper.) He did this for a few years, and from all the drafts he's learn a fair amount.
So after 5 years of working as a freelance drafter, a young guy who has a newly minted Master-Architect cert reaches out to my uncle and asks if he's hiring. My uncle thinks about it and says--- yeah, actually, I am. With a master-architect on staff he can submit actual plans to cities. In addition my uncle asks the young master-architect to sponsor my uncle in a master's certification. The way that my uncle talks about it, it was almost a sham of a "sponsorship"-- especially since my uncle was both more experienced than and the employer of his sponsor.
To be fair, the most well known examples of architecture tend to cost a lot of money to construct, and people spending lots of money want someone with experience. If you look at painters for example, a lot of them produce great work at relatively younger ages than architects, probably because the barriers to entry are lower.
Still, it seems that in the arts, you can continue to produce great work for a long time. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built and Leonardo Da Vinci was over 50 when he painted the Mona Lisa.
> Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built
As a teenager in rural Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright worked for a graduate of MIT school of architecture and then went to Madison to work for a civil engineering professor at UW Madison. His big break was to run away from home and go to Chicago, which was in the midst of the largest building boom in the history of the world up to then, where he was hired within a day of arriving by the firm owned by the MIT grad he worked for years before.
The guy started very early and then never stopped working.
Meh, I think architecture has its own version of it, with extreme form-over-function, and new projects insisting they have to look clever and pretty, even when those aspects make them near useless.
A friend on Facebook recently posted about an example of a bike path with three sharp turns that made no sense for being used as a bike, but -- the architects were happy to point out -- made it look like a big bike wheel from above. Hooray!
Re: bootcamps, there are several non-credit summer programs offered by major architecture programs (Harvard, Berkeley,..) that help prospective students expose themselves to architecture school and more importantly, help them develop a portfolio to apply to the full program. These programs are proportionally just as (very) expensive and (extremely) time consuming. A not small number of degree seeking students come through that track.
PLOT cofounders Bjarke Ingels and Julien de Smedt were in their mid-twenties when they started out. Today, Bjarke Ingels Group is among the most influential firms in the world. Julien's own firm is also doing well, last I heard. Their old boss at OMA, Rem Koolhaas, started that firm when he was barely 30. Still a bit older than 22 years, but closer to that than 40. They're the LeBron James exceptions that prove the rule though. Though there are some amazingly talented architects in their 20's, it usually takes a lot of time to get the momentum necessary to be able to be the figurehead of an organization that depends on hefty commissions to keep running. Bjarke Ingels' openly flouts the architect-as-artist model of expecting clients to bend to their every whim and instead opts for an approach of mutually beneficial compromise. It's hard to argue with the results he's achieved. By trading some of his starchitect's share of cultural capital, he's gained the trust of influential clients on an accelerated timeline. It takes a special skillset to merry that to a coherent and compelling design aesthetic, which I think is also undeniable in BIG's case.
I've read a bit of Christopher Alexander, and at least by his view the profession of architecture was in a fallen state conducive to soulless work. I don't know myself, except I've been to Barcelona which must've been doing something different.
I'm pretty sure Alexander would see the same problems in most Barcelona architecture as he does in other cities. The design in Barcelona is very good by the standards of European cities (and exceptional relative to a lot of places) but the paradigm for architectural practice is still, broadly speaking, the modernist one. Alexander wants to go back to preindustrial vernacular building practices.
The employed architects I know are mostly miserable designing medical office buildings and similar crap, where design = shave a few hundred bucks off of the cost of every aspect of the project.
Napster was written by a 19yrs old.
Bram wrote bittorent when he was 26yrs old.
Justin Frankel was 22yrs old when he wrote gnutella with Tom who was 25yrs old.
I mention these systems, because these were apps that needed to operate at scale.
And they all leveraged some incredible pieces of infrastructure that were built up for them over several years by those with more experience, the primary examples being the Linux Socket library and the TCP/IP protocol.
Building an application that can "scale" doesn't mean it's well built. Modern software engineering sits on the shoulders of giants, especially older ones who came out of research labs.
That's likely because buildings are very expensive to build, and so who is going to risk tens of millions of dollars on a 22 year old architect with no track record?
As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of competence is so high that six months of concentrated effort is simply not sufficient for an outsider to become a professional architect.